Falcata - a Package from Madrid

Gregorio at La Flecha Negra has sent me some samples of the new 1/72 Falcata white metal Napoleonics, which look very good. He also included a couple of samples of the new Carlist Wars, which are also excellent.

Top, left to right are Spanish infantry in campaign dress, a couple of Grenadiers and a line infrantryman in full dress, while below are the Carlist samples. Figures are nicely sculpted and animated, as you would expect, and stand about 24mm from soles of feet to scalp.

Gregorio also got hold of a couple of boxes of set FE-1808-07 for me, the guerrilleros from the old boxed Falcata series. I was very keen to get these, partly because I wants them (my precious...), but also because as far as I knew these never made it into production, and I had never even seen pictures of them. Here are some samples from these boxes - you get 34 castings in a box, with a wide variety of poses (especially suitable for irregulars). 1 box has 3 commanders, 3 standard bearers, 2 musicians (a drummer and a bagpipe player), a couple of dead guys and a whole bunch of fighting figures, including a female partisan.

Gregorio hopes that he may have a supply of the old boxed Falcatas in a month or two - whether that means that they are being reissued or if it is old stock I do not know. In the meantime, if you are interested in the new ranges (12 infantry or 3 cavalry or a gun + crew in a bag), please contact Gregorio at LFN - they have stock available now, and they are very nice, helpful people to deal with - they do not take PayPal, but international money transfers are very easy now - even from Britain!

I am a happy bunny today - nice job, Postie.

British Artillery Caissons, and Some Very Big Guns

Delayed by a late decision to strip the limbers, here are two examples of what Carl Franklin, in his lovely book, describes as the British Two-Wheeled Ammunition Car. A quick glance, of course, will confirm that the car is hooked up behind a standard limber, so it is in fact a four-wheeled vehicle, but articulated, which was regarded as a big advance over the earlier rigid 4-wheeler. These are the carts which accompanied the individual batteries into action, to provide an immediate reserve of ammunition.

The models are Lamming throughout - equipment and horses, and also the drivers, as evidenced by their Easter Island profiles and the trademark Lamming elephant whip. My thanks and compliments to Clive and to Dave Watson, who somehow came up with yet more supplies of extinct artillery kit.

Since I am deep in the artillery projects box at present, I think I may take the opportunity to make up and paint some more siege guns. As these may be of some interest, here are a couple I prepared earlier. I included a more normal 9pdr gun to give an idea of scale, and you will see that these siege guns are very bad boys indeed. These are 18pdrs from Hinchliffe's (current) 25mm scale range, which should make them way too big for the Minifigs gunners. Before you laugh (and I laughed myself before I checked the sizes), be assured that I have measured these castings and they are spot-on for 1/72 of the official weapon dimensions for an iron 18pdr. Further, Clive and I once put these same Hinch 25 castings alongside a Finescale Factory model of an 18pdr, and they were exactly the same size - I am not even prepared to consider that FSF would ever make anything which was not perfect 1/72, so let's just assume this is what they were like.

Big.

Anyway, I have 2 or 3 more of these to prepare, and a 10" howitzer, so I may take a short break from painting vehicles. Note also that my Allied Siege Train and associated engineering chaps have their bases painted a fetching shade of mud brown. It seemed a good idea at the time.

Royal Horse Artillery - Limber Teams

More vehicles ready - in this case, they are well overdue. I sold my old (Airfix) limbers around 7 years ago, and they'd been kind of decommissioned for a while prior to that. Since then I've been hoarding the bits for the replacements in my spares boxes, and systematically playing leapfrog with the painting queue so that they never actually got done.

Well, no longer - here are three RHA limbers, ready to go. Although I like to use 2 model guns for a battery, I use only a single limber when they are travelling, so this group represents all my three horse artillery troops on the road. I used to like the idea of having loose, "deployable" guns, so that I could actually move the ordnance pieces between the limber and the gun crew, but I have decided it is not one of my greatest ideas. I have dropped more cannons than enough, so I've saved up enough extra guns to be able to have some permanently attached to the limbers, and everything is now safely glued in place.

The horses and riders are all S-Range Minifigs, the limbers are Hinchliffe 20mm, and one of the guns is also Hinch 20, while the other two are (I think) Rose Miniatures. It stands to reason that the actual gunners get first choice of the Hinch 20 artillery...

British caissons will be along next, in a day or two - a couple of the limbers allocated to them are in the bleach at the moment.

British Ammunition Carts

On a vehicle-painting kick again this weekend, all British stuff. Two ammo carts finished last night - they have just to get the mag sheet on the underside of the bases for storage in the official Artillery Boxes.

The carts are S-Range Minifigs, horses and drivers are by Lamming. There will/should be some caissons in a day or so, and three 4-horse RHA limber teams.

Good fun. I wouldn't like to be hit by one of those whips, though.

New in The Cupboard

For me, the personalities in my wargames armies are important. It is always a source of extra satisfaction if there is a customised drummer in this regiment, or an odd figure with a bit of history in that one. One of my French infantry battalions, for example, has - completely out of context - a mounted officer from the first box of Airfix Waterloo French I ever bought. After a period when I have systematically cleared out and replaced all the figures which were substandard, and bought in all sorts of prestigious castings from Jorg Schmaeling and so on, I deliberately retained that one Airfix officer as a memorial to the early days of my armies, when Airfix formed most of what I had.

Non-regulation hat

In a similar vein, I am always on the lookout for unusual staff figures - it is not so easy to believe in your generals if they are all very obviously identical brothers, from the same mould. Here's a new chap - a French General de Brigade wearing an infantry shako - form your own explanation why he chooses to wear his lucky hat (or whatever) - this is clearly Hinton Hunt FN224 with a new head. I am reluctant to hack up old HH figures myself, but am always pleased to buy in conversions which someone else has done, to add variety - I like this little chap.


Late edit, to oblige Louis - as requested, here is the old Airfix mounted officer in the 2/27e Ligne. This entire brigade used to be Airfix - the officer must date from the very early 1970s - you will note that in those days I was keen enough to replace sword-blades with dressmaking pins. To heighten the contrast, I see that the Les Higgins rank and file are now augmented by distinctly up-market eagle-bearer and drummer from Art Miniaturen.

Not a THIRD Battalion, Surely?

My Peninsular War Allied army has two battalions of the 95th, 6 companies of the 5/60th and two KGL light battalions, so I already have more little green men than you could shake a ramrod at. This last year, in fact, I have sold, given away and otherwise disposed of some dozens of unpainted Les Higgins riflemen from the spares department, since only a madman could possibly need any more than I already have.

Right.

Unexpectedly, from various sources I have now obtained enough of the excellent Qualiticast Rifles figures to make up another of my small rifle units, so here, gentlemen, we have the 3rd Battalion of the 95th, some of them wearing the very cool forage cap, in appropriately Sharpesque style. Of course, I might have used them to replace one of my existing Higgins units, but I couldn't bring myself to do this, so three battalions it is - which is historically correct for the late Peninsular War anyway, I hasten to add.

Tree Blight

For the scenic aspects of my wargaming I use - pretty much exclusively - very old Merit trees. These were made by J & L Randall Ltd, whose range of HO/OO railway accessories is legendary, and I have a lot of them, in the three known varieties, some dating back to the late 1950s, I would guess. Some of my oldest fir trees of this type were among the very earliest trackside scenic add-ons for my first model railway (if anyone cares, my first loco was the Hornby Dublo LMS "Duchess of Atholl", which was prehistoric even when I first got it).

The definitive posting on Merit is in Clive's wonderful Hinton Hunter blog, here. I love these trees. I'm not completely sure why - they don't look especially realistic, to be sure, but they are part of that old black-and-white tradition in Terry Wise's early books and elsewhere, they are clean and practical, and I have come to take them for granted as part of my own arrangements. I have also owned much more expensive and exotic trees from all sorts of specialist makers, and they have come and gone - literally - like the withering leaves. Storage is never satisfactory with the de-luxe jobs, and I have a lifelong hatred of foliage flock detritus - no doubt a symptom of a heavily anal upbringing, but also of the permanent need to have wargaming co-exist pleasantly and harmoniously with the other activities of formal dining-rooms etc. So all the fancy stuff has passed on, yet I still have the Merit trees, augmented now and then by finds on eBay and elsewhere. The prices have become a bit silly - especially for someone like me who doesn't even keep the original boxes.

Shock horror. My world is now threatened by the gradual deterioration of my trees. The plastic, over all this time, has started to change. The rot is uneven, but some of them now have the structural properties of spun sugar, and are extremely delicate. I try to glue damage as it occurs, but I can see that my HO/OO plastic ecosphere is showing signs of sliding into history. This is not a trivial matter - I really don't know what I shall do if I have to replace them. No-one has ever made a direct equivalent and - very sadly indeed - the re-issue of almost the entire Merit range by Modelscene has specifically excluded the trees. I gather that the moulds were beyond redemption, and it has been suggested to me that they are unlikely to reappear, since modern flocked trees are so good now, and only a crazed nostalgist would want the Merit items.

I can almost feel the tears welling up as I write this. I shall continue to look after the trees I have left, but this is beginning to feel like a real ecological issue - does no-one care if, along with the red squirrel, my silly old trees disappear? I have to stop now - can't go on...